Finding Yourself Through Online Identities

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There’s an interesting article over on the BBC where a journalist goes through a Privacy Epiphany moment and realizes that he can don that Red Coat and manage his identity to be a ‘new’ Bill Thompson.

In the BBC article he realizes how far he’s already put himself out there:

I’m on MySpace, though that isn’t a major part of my online world these days and I’m mostly there to see how younger people are using it. I also have an Orkut profile I rarely visit, a LiveJournal account I never update, and I seem to recall signing up with Bebo last year.

I’m in Second Life, on MSN and Google Chat, have dozens of contacts on Skype and am now a part of the growing Joost community, checking out its online TV service. There are blogs… where I manage the space for others and post myself. And I’m also present in a lot of more private spaces… or the wiki we use to plan each week’s Digital Planet.

Many of these services link together, and with a little effort I could integrate them even more fully. So far I use 30boxes to put my calendar online and have it automatically update both iCal on my MacBook and Outlook on my desktop Windows PC.

I can post photos from my Flickr site directly to my blog. And I can Twitter through my chat client on my laptop instead of having to do it through a web browser.

On how he’s come to terms with the what people can find out about him:

I rarely talk about my personal life, and reveal few details of my family or close relationships. Now that is changing. Facebook exposes my friendship networks to public view. 30Boxes encourages me to share my engagements, although here I do take care about what I advertise. And Twitter creates a constant temptation to reveal the minute details of daily life to the world.

With my calendar, my location, my friendships and my opinions all online to be read and remembered, there’s little of me left to expose. Perhaps it’s time to set up my own streaming video channel on Ustream.tv and broadcast my life to the world.

On living with the death of privacy:

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

BBC NEWS

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